Colorful, Psychedelic-Style Digital Artwork

Psychedelic art (as you may have guessed) is a type of artwork inspired by psychedelic experiences that are brought on as a side-effect by various drugs and substances known as hallucinations. The art movement began in the 1960's (known as the "hippy years") where sex, drugs and rock and roll played a huge role in the culture, and before long this artistic style was being used in concert posters, album art covers, comic books and newspapers. One particular style of psychedelic artwork was inspired by the hallucinations experienced by a drug called LSD, which was known for its kaleidoscopic patterns, similar to those the younger generation experienced with the popular kaleidoscope toy.

As life moves on everything is becoming digital, and over the years digital psychedelic art, although not in vogue, has been slowly increasing in popularity. Bright colors and fractal patterns are fairly easy to produce on a computer, so it only makes sense that psychedelic art is being produced digitally. This showcase presents thirty unique, interesting and out-of-the-ordinary colorful and psychedelic inspired artworks. What's your favorite, and do you think digital psychedelic art is the way to go, or will it never be quite the same as those produced with traditional media? Let us know in the comments at the bottom of the post!

Symmetry uses three-dimensional shapes and simple fractal backgrounds in the background of the piece merged with some strong colors and textured images to create a unique piece. The typography is cleverly mirrored; although back to front, it is extremely easy to read.

Black Hole Sun is a t-shirt design (click through link to see t-shirt). It combines clean-cut shapes, splashes, bright colors and subtle textures to create a very visually appealing piece that can have us mesmerised in seconds.

Head Explosion is another piece whose primary shapes are simply black lines on a white background. This piece, however, is brought to life using cleaner and smoother colored shapes rather than the strong textured images that were using in Line Emotions. A subtle texture in the background is also used, bringing out the best of the colors used in the main illustration.

This piece is probably the piece that comes closest to traditional psychedelic art in this showcase, combining a bunch of bright and vivid colors that you normally wouldn’t dream of putting together in such a way.

Psychedelic River is a reasonably simple piece, but at the same time is very detailed. It's bursting with color and full of tiny little images that you can only see when staring at the piece for a longer period of time than that you would looking at most other pieces.

Here we have another fractal piece; Psychedelic Swirls, however, is a much more swirly fractal piece of artwork, using the colors from the traditional style and merging it with an increasingly popular modern day trend.

This three-dimensional rendered digital piece uses the power of a professional rendering software and is then finished off with an image editing application to give it some great texture, colors and glows.

One of my personal favorites in this showcase, Postmodern Psychedelic is an extremely intricate digital piece of art. The highlighting is so detailed that when viewed at full size could be mistaken as a glass painting.

Psychedelic Trip is a powerful piece, and when viewed full size feels like you are being taken into a different world. Almost (but not quite) symmetrical, the piece uses repetitive patterns and vivid colors to draw in and keep the viewers attention.

The following five pieces (all of which are by the same artist) are packed full of color and lots of different medias, from photographic elements to sketches and vector shapes to patterns. All five pieces are extremely detailed, interesting and compelling.

Psychedelic Desert Dreams is an unusual yet interesting digital piece. The desert floor is made up of circles in various colors and the sky using various glows, highlights and shadows among ray patterns to draw the viewers eyes into the centre of the piece.